Steph McGovern

Like you'll lose all the high streets again, would we just become homogenized?

You'd lose all of the, you know, the independent, brilliant shops.

The people around here run the gift shop.

What do we just say to them?

Give up.

My point is, you're right.

Of course, businesses have got to survive on their own.

They've got to be able to be productive, to be efficient and everything else.

They've got to be agile and all of that.

My beef is that all of these things, all of these tax rises and cost increases happened at the same time.

So suddenly, within the space of a few months, everything went up in price and a lot of that was policy driven.

not just energy costs or raw material costs or things like that.

It was policy-driven decisions which suddenly ramped up everyone's costs.

And it is unfair to expect businesses to just be able to shoulder all that

and stay as productive and as efficient and as everything else.

And that was my point is it just feels that we as businesses were told when then 40 billion tax rises came in, don't worry guys, you'll just be hit with this once.

And it isn't, it's just an endless stream of costs going up.

And that is very hard for all those business owners out there to shoulder.

You know, you are broadly talking about the dismantling of the Western way of doing things.

Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Money with me, Robert Pest.